to descend to a subdivision so minute as his own. A
task of this sort is never an easy one, and in this instance the
difficulties are increased by the diffuse and complicated nature of the
subject matter; and because, owing to Cardan's wayward mental habit,
there is no saying in what corner of the ten large folios which contain
his writings some pregnant and characteristic sentence, picturing
effectively some aspect of his nature or perhaps exhibiting the man at a
glance, may not be hidden away.

It must not be inferred, because Cardan himself and his critics after him,
have laid such great stress upon his vices and imperfections, that he was
devoid of virtues. The most striking and remarkable of his merits was his
industry, but even in this particular instance, where his excellence is
most clearly manifest, he is constantly lamenting his waste of time and
idleness. Again and again he mourns over the precious hours he has spent
over chess and dice and games of chance. In his counsels to his children,
he compares a gambler to a sink of all the vices, and in writing of his
early life at Sacco he describes himself as an idle profligate, and tells
how he entirely neglected his profession. If indeed such monstrous cantles
were cut out of his time through idleness he must, though his life proved
a long one, have possessed extraordinary power of rapid production; for
the huge mass of his published work, without taking any account of the
many manuscripts he burned from time to time, would, in the case of most
men, represent the ceaseless labour of a long life. And the _corpus_ is
not great by reason of haste or want of finish. He has recorded more than
once how it was ever his habit to let his work be polished to the utmost
before putting it in type. The citations with which his pages bristle
proclaim him to be a reader almost as voracious and catholic as Burton;
and Naude, with the watchfulness of the hostile critic in his heart and
the bookworm's knowledge in his brain, would have been ready and able to
convict him of quoting authors he had not read, if the least handle for
this charge should have been given, but no accusation of the kind is
preferred. The story of his life shows him to be full of rough candour and
honesty, and unlikely to descend to subterfuge, while his great love of
reading and his accurate retentive memory would make easy for him a task
which ordinary mortals might well regard as hopeless.

Those critics